First black woman mayor in Mississippi

The Associated Press

JACKSON, Miss. — An outspoken civil rights activist who was born to sharecroppers in the segregated American South and rose to become the first African American woman to win a mayor’s race in Mississippi has died.

Unita Blackwell was 86. She died Monday at Ocean Springs Hospital, according to Cynthia Goodloe Palmer, executive director of Mississippi Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement, who received the details from Blackwell’s son, Jeremiah Blackwell Jr.

Unita Blackwell was born in the impoverished Mississippi Delta during the Great Depression. She grew up in Mississippi and Arkansas, and had to leave school when she was 12 to work as a farm laborer.

Blackwell became active in the civil rights movement in the Delta in 1964 as a field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. She and other black residents of Issaquena County tried to register to vote that year, but were rejected because of a test rigged for them to fail.

In a 1986 interview for the civil rights documentary “Eyes on the Prize,” Blackwell recalled trying to secure voting rights for African Americans who made up a majority of the Delta’s population but held none of the political power.

“I was only told when I started off that if I registered to vote that I would have food to eat and a better house to stay in, ’cause the one I was staying in was so raggedy you could see anywhere and look outdoors. That I would have, my child would have a better education,” she said.

“And at that particular point, our children only went to school two to three months out of the year. … And for the whites, they understood it even larger than that in terms of political power, and we hadn’t even heard that word, political power, because it wasn’t even taught in the black schools.”

Along with fellow activist Fannie Lou Hamer, Blackwell was part of the integrated Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegation that challenged seating of the state’s all-white delegation at the 1964 Democratic National Convention.

Blackwell sued the Issaquena County school board in 1965 after 300 students, including her son, were suspended for wearing pins supporting civil rights.